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Life Lately | November 2018
Thinking: I didn’t write about it earlier this month but I went on my first overnight trip away from Forest in early November. I’ve been ready for a weekend away for several years now but I knew Forest wasn’t. Finally this summer I knew that it would be a lot easier to get away for the weekend and so two of my friends and I made plans to spend a night away. We’ve been friends since the summer of 1998 and were living aboard the TS Texas Clipper II. Ideally we would have liked some quaint cabin in the Hill Country but with last minute planning and driving distance we…
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We Got Bees! | Wayback Wednesday
No, we didn’t get new bees, but I was on my podcast’s YouTube channel the other day, something I’ve kind of abandoned but am thinking of resurrecting, and found some adorable videos of Forest. One was the time we went to pick up a new package of bees and the second is him planting green beans. Man, it’s been so long since he talked toddler/baby-like I forgot what it was like! Also, I’m going to reach through and pinch his cheeks! Feel free to skip around on the bee video, it is a bit long. Anyway, I’m thinking of doing more videos again and just keeping them simple. All the…
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Late November Harvest
I’m usually a lounge-about morning person, sipping my coffee, surfing the internet as I eat breakfast. This morning I was itching to get outside after our week away. It was compounded by the freezes the week before that and general dreary weather the last several weeks. I was outside by 8:30 this morning with a wonderful spring-like atmosphere. It was glorious! My goal was to start attacking the edible garden. Before the freeze it was in decent shape though it needed to be weeded and some leaf removal from the rows of seedlings needed to occur. After the freeze lots of plants needed to be taken down and added to…
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West, To the Mountains
*Photos are from my phone, sorry for the sketchy quality* Planning Thanksgiving campouts can be tricky. Is it going to be too cold? Rainy? Sunny and cold is one thing, rainy and cold is another. A few months ago we sat down and made our camping reservations for the year, which you have to do because reservations at popular state parks fill up months in advance, and Chris pinpointed that he really wanted to go the Davis Mountains State Park in Fort Davis. For those unfamiliar with just how big Texas is, this drive from our house to the state park is akin to driving from Washington DC to Portland,…
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Lepidopterans at Mission Tejas State Park
Campsite six at Mission Tejas State Park turned out to be a great spot in the late fall afternoon sun to butterfly watch. I think I’ve seen hackberry emperors around a few times before but I’ve never spend a lot of time watching them, so I wasn’t even sure that’s what it was when I noticed several of them basking in the sun on the trees at the site. Luckily we had brought the fold out nature guides of Forest’s and I was able to confirm it was hackberry emperors hanging around out campsite. Joining it was a red admiral and a couple of honeybees as they feasted on the…
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Flora, Fauna, and Fungi at Lake Livingston State Park | Part II
White Heath Aster, Symphyotrichum ericoides I think this is likely late goldenrod, Solidago altissima. Either way, an open field of goldenrod flanked by bushy bluestem is my kind of fall scene! Bushy Goldentop, Euthamia leptocephala. Solidago’s look-alike cousin. The trail we were on when I saw this mushroom was an elevated boardwalk. I hadn’t seen a mushroom that large before so I hopped down, clambered over some smilax vines and rotting logs and took a few photos. I know mushrooms get much larger in other areas of the country but this wasn’t something we normally see here in my part of the world. I put this into iNaturalist as Carolina…
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Flora, Fauna, and Fungi at Lake Livingston State Park | Part I
I never know with these flora, fauna, fungi type posts whether to write up something to go with it or just share the photos. Part of me writes for an audience, albeit the tiny one that I have, and part of me writes for myself. I am sure most people skim over a lot of these types of posts but I do write a lot of them for me. Sometimes I delve back into older posts to revisit things we’ve done and it is honestly amazing how much I forget that we have done, or I’ll forget some tiny detail and a photo will bring the entire situation back to…
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Camping at Lake Livingston State Park | October 2018
October felt a million months long. So long that this trip to Lake Livingston State Park feels like it happened about three months ago and not four weeks ago. We only stayed a night and cut our trip short Sunday morning as I wrote about here that Forest had had a rough night from being sick. And I completely forgot I had already somewhat explained here, in that post I referenced, about tagging monarchs. Seriously, October was long. Because we only camped one night we weren’t able to get a site in the Piney Shores Loop, which has had renovations in the last few years and is where we’ve stayed…
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Tagging Monarchs
*Behold, crappy phone photos ahead!* After I started raising the monarch caterpillars last year I read about tagging them with tiny stickers from Monarch Watch so that those counting the fall migration back to their roosts in the mountains of Mexico could attempt to put together the pieces of where the final generations of monarchs came from. Chris ordered some stickers back in the spring or summer and they are all mailed according to where you live in the monarch migration process. So, the further south you are the later you get yours. Considering last year we had monarchs in early August I was a bit disappointed we weren’t getting…